Twenty Mangoes

When I was a kid in Uganda I didn't see it. The poverty that many of my country mates live with, I mean. That sounds impossible now, I know. But you don't see the water you're swimming in. It was just the street. Some people had more and some had less and none of it landed as a fact about the world, because it was the world.

Then I left.

Now I come back a few times a year. The first day always does the same thing. I get off the plane. I'm hungry, I need some Ugandan fruit.

There's a woman who sells mangoes. There has always been one. I want to talk about one in particular. Who caught my eye. She had about twenty mangoes in her basket. Call it fifty cents each. So ten dollars, if she sells all of them. She won't sell all of them. Some days it's four.

I stood there and did the math like an idiot. Ten dollars. A whole day. And I thought, how does she live on this. I couldn't live on this. I couldn't live on ten times this.

That sentence is where I keep getting stuck. "I couldn't live on this." Listen to it. It takes her whole day and holds it up against my floor and decides her day comes up short. As if my floor were the floor. As if she were failing at something, instead of just doing it, in front of me, while I stand there horrified while counting her fruit.

I don't know her. I want to be honest about that. I turned a person into a basket and a number because numbers are all I am educated to understand. I don't know if she's funny. I don't know who she's feeding, or whether she's tired of standing, or what she makes of the man lingering too long near her mangoes. I handed her a tragedy because I had one on me.

And then I got in the car. I'm always the one who gets in the car. I felt the horror and I carried it back to London, where it settles into something I can write down. It's light. It costs me nothing to bring home.

I used to think the gap between me and her was money. Now I think it might just be that I left. She stayed inside the thing I learned to look at from outside. The looking is the distance. The kid I was didn't flinch, because the kid I was was closer to her than I am now.

I still don't know how she lives. I know I counted her mangoes and then I left. I can't tell anymore if the horror was for her or for me.